


College AU One-Shots

by actualbabe



Series: We All Die Trying to Get it Right (the college au) [2]
Category: New Girl
Genre: College AU, Enemies to Lovers, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-05 02:24:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15854298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/actualbabe/pseuds/actualbabe
Summary: A compilation of one-shots/prompts from the college au(does contain spoilers for the full fic!)





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Start of winter break, Nick and Jess have been on a few dates, but they aren't officially together

They’re about a week into Winter Break when Nick calls her completely out of the blue, and she answers it on a whim. But what starts as an accidental pocket dial quickly turns into one of their long, meandering conversations where they talk about everything and nothing while time flies by without them. If Jess closes her eyes it’s almost like they aren’t half-way across the country from each other, instead they’re lying in his bed in some state of undress while he complains about a professor getting on his ass about his overdue assignment and she fusses over whether the newly elected Young Dems president will be able to uphold her own legacy. 

It’s nearly one in the morning, and Jess is going to be exhausted tomorrow when she has to go to her uncle’s Christmas party. The naggy, responsible voice in the back of her head tells her to stop being so ridiculous and just hang up the phone already. But every time she thinks about hitting  _end call_  Nick says something that makes her laugh and she just can’t bring herself to tear herself away.  

“Nick,” she says with a bemused smile. “It’s two days before Christmas and you haven’t gotten  _anyone_  gifts?”

“Look,” he counters, and she can almost hear his grin over the phone. It’s not as good as the real thing, but it’s close enough. “I’m not exactly… organized.”

“Really?” Jess says sarcastically.

“Shut up,” he mutters back, and Jess giggles again. “Look, I’m not good at this kind of thing.”

“You’re making a bigger deal of it than you need to.” She flops back onto the bed, staring up at her ceiling as she absentmindedly twirls a lock of her hair between her fingers. “I’ve had gifts for everyone for like three weeks now.”

“Seriously?” he utters in grumpy disbelief, and Jess’ smile widens a tiny fraction more. “That’s just unfair.”

“What!” she protests. “I’m just good at giving gifts. I’m like a gift genius.”

“Okay, fine.” There’s a slight squeak of his bed springs as he presumably flips over in bed. “Ms. Gift Guru. Help me out here.”

“Okay…” Jess sits up against her pillows, wiggling her toes and looking down at the chipping red and green nail polish. “Shoot.”

Nick rustles with a few papers, and Jess isn’t sure if he’s actually trying to find his list or if he’s just hamming it up with her. Either way it makes her giggle. He clears his throat before starting, “So for my mom I have about five dollars to spend, but she said I’m not allowed to give her five dollars this year. And then I was going to get her hangers, but she said no hangers.”

Jess hums in consideration. “Oh! So here’s what you do. You get a keychain, and then cut out a piece of cardboard to look like a key, and then on the key you write ‘Property of Your Son’s Heart.’”

“That’s good,” he says, impressed.

“Told you,” Jess preens proudly.  

“Alright…” Nick shuffles the paper again and Jess bites back a laugh. She swings herself around to lie back down on the bed, her head hanging off the side so her hair falls all around her face, the ends brushing over the carpeted floor. “Okay what about my dad? He hates everything and-”

“Bacon,” Jess interrupts. 

“My sister-in-law? She’s six months pregnant and-”

“Fake mustache.”

Nick laughs. “Alright, yeah, you  _are_ good at this.”

Jess grins, stretching her legs up to lean them against her wall. “Told you.”

“Oh, here’s a good one,” he says, a mischievous hint to his voice. “Jessica Day.”

“Hey!” she protests. “That’s cheating.”

“Come on,” Nick groans on the other end of the line. “Tell me what you want.”

“That’s not how it works!” Jess insists with a laugh.

“Then how am I supposed to get you something you like?” Nick pouts and she can perfectly envision his little turtle face. 

“Well that’s the thing about giving a gift, right? That you have to figure that part out on your own.” Jess sits up in bed again and glances up at the ancient posters she has tacked up on the wall, portraits of bands she doesn’t even listen to anymore. She knows they’re just joking. But there’s this subtle earnestness to Nick’s words, something heart-wringingly genuine that makes her miss him a little more. Which is silly, because it’s barely been a week, and it’s not like they’re  _together-_ together or anything.

“For real, Jess.” His voice is soft, a little rough from exhaustion and it dawns on her again that it’s ridiculously late, even later for his time zone. Nick’s always more honest when he’s tired, all those filters he works so hard to keep up start to deteriorate and she gets a peek at all those secrets he keeps trapped up inside his heart. “What should I get for you?”

His sincerity makes her breath catch, and she wonders if it was loud enough for him to hear it over the phone. Nick keeps surprising her like this, with how much he cares. “ _I’m gonna miss ya,”_ he had whispered to her at the airport, his arms wrapped around her and his face tucked into her neck. Jess had let her eyes fall shut as she hugged him back, clutching at the fabric of his jacket to keep him close for just a few seconds more. 

“Just…” she trails off, a little unsure. It’s tricky, because she can’t really gauge his reactions over the phone like this, and the last thing she wants is to throw off the already unsteady balance of their incredibly fragile not-really-a-relationship. She nervously tugs at a loose thread on her bedspread. “Um, think about, you know, what I mean to you, and get a gift that reflects that.”

“Right.”

There’s a loaded silence between them, like the night Nick picked her up from that house party and he said he’d do anything for her, or the moment in Nick’s truck when they pulled into the airport parking lot and realized that this was the end of whatever happened between them this semester. Little pockets of time where everything else comes to a standstill and it’s just  _them_ , suddenly very aware that the thing they’ve been building is very,  _very_  real. 

Nick clears his throat on the other end of the line, and Jess’ heart sinks when she realizes she’s said the wrong thing and that he’s about to hang up on her. But then he softly asks, “So what are you going to get for me?”

An icy chill rushes down her veins at his seemingly innocent words. Jess doesn’t  _know_  what she would get him. They’ve only been on a handful of ‘official’ dates during the last two weeks of the semester, even though they were fucking pretty regularly for months before that. She honestly didn’t think they were going to do the whole gift thing when they got back to campus. And if she’s being  _really_  honest, there’s a part of her that was afraid that they weren’t going to do anything when they got back to campus, that they would both go back to living their separate lives as if this whole thing had never even happened.

“Well…” Jess nervously chews on her lower lip. “My initial thought was to get you a gift certificate for piping hot sex.” 

“Really?” Nick asks, equal parts disbelief and interest. “You’re being serious?”

She laughs a little. “But I don’t want you to think that I’m just using you for your body.”

“I dunno,” he disagrees quickly. “Cause I’m pretty okay with that.”

“Well I guess you’ll just have to wait and see, then.” Jess smiles down at her bedspread, feeling ridiculously happy. 

“I guess so,” he says, and she can hear his mile-wide grin all the way from Chicago. 

* * *

 

Jess gives him a coupon for “ _Hot Nerdy Sex that works for both of us”_  and he barely waits a full week before he cashes it in. She wears her fake pearls and a fancy hat and does her Judy Garland accent until she’s too distracted by the feel of Nick’s hands up her skirt and his mouth against her skin to keep going. He grins at her afterwards, runs his fingers through her messy hair as she presses kisses over his cheeks and nose before he finally captures her mouth with his own.

She also gives him a matching scarf and hat that she knit for him. He insists on wearing them  _everywhere_  they go for the following days, but Jess can’t find room in her heart to be annoyed at him for it, not when he looks so happy to have something that she made specifically with him in mind.

Nick gets her a necklace, dainty and delicate. His fingertips brush lightly over the back of her neck when he helps her put it on. Once it’s secure, he traces over the line of the golden chain down over her collarbone to the pendant, a tiny heart that rests just a few inches above her own frantically pounding one. Her gaze darts up from his hand to catch him staring at her, something complicated shimmering in his eyes.

“Merry Christmas,” he whispers with a sheepish smile.

She grabs the front of his shirt and hauls him in for a kiss without even a second thought.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Occurs during the spring semester, Nick and Jess are officially together

“I like getting older. I feel like I’m finally aging into my personality,” Nick says, staring up at the ceiling of his room. He turns his head to look at Jess with an apologetic smile. “But I  _hate_ birthdays.”

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Jess says with a laugh, shifting on the bed to rest her weight up on one elbow. 

“I know,” he groans, but doesn’t offer up any additional explanation.

Jess absentmindedly traces a line down the middle of his shirt-clad chest and hums in thought. They’ve been dating for a while now, and this is the first birthday they’ve had as a couple. Hers isn’t for a few more months, dangerously close to graduation. She quickly shoves that thought aside, at least for the time being. Just because she and Nick have been together for a while, that doesn’t mean things are  _serious_ between them, and there’s no real guarantee they’ll even last that long. 

(Well, she really, really hopes that they’ll last that long. It’s a little terrifying to admit, but she’s starting to come to the slow realization that Nick just might be  _the one_.)

But that’s not the important matter at hand.

“Really, Jess, you don’t have to do anything fancy,” he insists. “Just being with you is enough. We’ll just take the day off. Sleep in, have sex, order Chinese takeout, have sex, catch up on our Netflix queue, have some more sex…”

Jess rolls her eyes. Her boyfriend really is insatiable. But she can’t deny that it sends a thrill through her, to know that Nick  _wants_ her like that, like he just can’t get enough of her. It makes her feel impossibly sexy, like she’s some kind of siren who can lure him into a shipwreck with just a sultry look. 

“We can’t spend the entire day having sex,” she counters.

Nick leers up at her and catches the hand that she’s been trailing down his chest. He threads their fingers together, his thumb running over the skin of her inner wrist in a way that shouldn’t be hot, but somehow is, her breath all caught up in her chest as her heart beats a little faster. 

“I dunno,” he counters, raising her hand towards his mouth to press his lips to her knuckles. “We haven’t tried the shower yet. And I saw this one position in a magazine that might be real good.”

“Did you steal my  _Cosmo_?” Jess asks with a laugh. She thought she left it in his room the last time she came over.

He blushes a little and shrugs. “Maybe…”

She leans in to kiss him softly, just the barest brush of her mouth against his. “C’mon, I  _want_ to do something special.”

“Jess…”

“Let me throw you a party,” she suggests insistently, trying to come up with something he can agree to. “A tiny little thing. Just our friends. We’ll get good beer and you won’t have to tend bar at all.”

Nick huffs and looks back up to the ceiling. “I just… I don’t like being the center of attention. I don’t deserve that or… you know. Anything exceptional.”

Jess’ heart aches a little at his words and the casual way he says them. He does so much to tear himself down, ignoring all his successes in favor of his faults. Sometimes she just wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him down until he finally gets that she likes him for who he is, not who he isn’t. 

“Look, we’ll do your plan for the day,” Jess concedes. “But you’ll let me throw you a party in the evening, because it’s your birthday and we’re your friends and we want to celebrate you, because we  _like_ you, you dummy.” She lowers her voice down to a tentative whisper, teasing her fingers over the exposed strip of his stomach below the hem of his shirt and just above the waistband of his sweatpants, “And then afterwards I’ll do that thing you like.”

Nick’s eyes darken in interest. “With the thing underneath the thing?”

A shiver runs through her at the memory. “Oh yeah.”

“Alright, fine.” He smirks and pulls her into another kiss, coaxing her to lie on top of him. “But I’m gonna complain the whole time.”

Jess smiles against his lips and kisses him back.


End file.
